The cone is not the business.
An ice cream maker on the Yorkshire coast, same family since 1879. Everyone who hears “ice cream” pictures a seafront kiosk on a hot Saturday. Most of the money walks in through a different door entirely.
Preview: dairydale.vercel.app →
Dairydale has been making ice cream in Filey for a hundred and forty-seven years. They run their own shops and their own vans. They also supply cafés, kiosks, farm shops and other people’s vans from Filey to Scarborough and well beyond — and that wholesale trade, not the seafront, is what the business is actually built on.
That single fact decides the whole site. Get it wrong and you build a lovely summer brochure for a company whose customers are mostly other businesses.
Two audiences, and only one of them is on holiday
A retail visitor wants flavours, opening hours and where to find a van. A trade visitor wants something completely different: pack sizes, minimum order, price breaks, delivery days, whether you cover their postcode, and whether they can get vegan and halal without running a second supplier.
Those are not two tones of the same page. They are two different documents, and the trade one is worth far more per visitor. So the trade price list is the primary call to action and the flavour list — the thing everybody assumes should lead — sits further down where the holidaymakers will still happily scroll to find it.
Design for the customer who pays the wages, not the one who is most fun to imagine.
The questions they ring up with
Ask any wholesaler what their phone is for and you get the same list: what flavours, what sizes, what’s the minimum, do you deliver to me, how quickly, and is there a contract. The same six questions, several times a day, answered by somebody who could be doing something else.
So they are on the page, numbered, in the order they get asked, with real answers rather than a form. A new stockist can find out whether Dairydale covers their village at eleven at night without waiting until Monday for a callback — and Dairydale get their morning back.
This is the least glamorous work in a build and reliably the most valuable. A page that answers the six questions is worth more than any amount of atmosphere.
A hundred and forty-seven years, stated plainly
The heritage is real and it is unusually good — 1879, still the same family, still their own vans rather than a courier. It would have been easy to drown that in sepia and script type and hand-drawn banners, which is where most heritage food brands end up.
The trouble with the nostalgia costume is that it reads as a decision made by a designer rather than a fact about the company. The date does more work stated flatly, next to the things that follow from it: our own vans, not a courier. Vegan, dairy-free, halal, gluten-free cones. A business that has survived since 1879 has done it by adapting, and the site should sound like it is still trading, not curating a museum.
What a placeholder is for
The site is finished and it is not finished. Every structural decision is made, but the flavour list, the price breaks, the minimums and the delivery areas are placeholders, clearly marked as such, waiting on the one person who actually knows the numbers.
I could have invented plausible ones. It would have looked more complete and it would have been worse, because a made-up minimum order is not a detail — it is a commercial term, and the first trade customer to hold you to it will not care that it was placeholder text.
So the preview carries a banner saying exactly which figures are unconfirmed. It is less impressive to look at and it is the only honest way to show unfinished work to the person paying for it.